paper

Settle in for the holidays and make some festive ornaments. These simple DIYs take just a little time and have big room for you to put your stamp on these festive bits and bobs. String them on your tree, make into garland, or pop around the house for a bit of holiday cheer.

Today we're beside ourselves with excitement as we announce the official launch of custom gift wrap on Spoonflower! As of this morning, you can upload your own design and have it printed on a roll of custom wrapping paper for only $15. Spoonflower designers can also choose to make any of their existing designs available for sale on gift wrap.

Those of you who follow Spoonflower probably know that we did a trial run for custom gift wrap in the weeks leading up to Christmas. We've taken what we learned from that trial run and created what we hope is a fully-hatched set of features around gift wrap. The satin finish wrapping paper, for example, is slightly lighter than the paper we offered in the fall.

Spoonflower Gift Wrap:

26in wide x 6ft rolls of gift wrap (66cm x 1.8m)

48 lb satin and 26 lb matte high-quality paper

Full-bleed printing from edge to edge

Our custom gift wrap is perfect for creating unique wrapping paper using photos, kids' drawings, or your own designs! It's also great for scrapbooking.

You may note that at the moment there is no shopping page for buying your favorite designs on gift wrap. Once the Spoonflower design community has had an opportunity to have a crack at gift wrap and to make a library of designs available for sale, we'll launch the shopping page. It should be up in a week or two!

This week, Spoonflower designer and paper collage artist, Sally Harmon (aka, Boris_Thumbkin), shares a tutorial on how to create a collection of fabric designs out of a single large paper collage. We’re in awe of Sally’s low-tech, approachable design technique which uses only scissors, paper, a camera, and the editing tools available right here on the Spoonflower site. Read on for the full tutorial below!

The process I show here is just one of many ways that you can create a whole collection of fabric designs from a cut paper collage. It’s a method that works for me because it’s low-tech, low overhead, low pressure, and no-stick since there’s no glue involved. WIth a little luck, you can create an entire collection of fabric designs sharing colors, shapes, and motifs!

1. CollectPaper. For all but the largest and most intricate shapes I like to use paint chips from a hardware or home improvement store. They’re free, they’re colorful, and they lay relatively flat.

2. Cut the Paper Into Shapes. First, trim any writing off the paint chips. Then just start cutting out shapes! I try to do a mix of shapes: geometric and organic, large and small, vertically- and horizontally-oriented, etc. Simple shapes can be cut freehand or, if you want some fancier shapes, try drawing them on the back of the paint chips first and then cutting them out.

Shapes with parts inaccessible to scissors can be cut out using an X-Acto knife fitted with a #15 blade and a cutting mat or board. Change the blade frequently and don’t rush or worry too much. Most mistakes can be repaired later and some turn out not to have been mistakes after all!

3. Lay Out The Cut Shapes to Create a Collage. I lay my shapes out onto sheets of 20″x30″ foamcore. These are good because they’re stiff enough to carry around in case I need to move my collage while working on it. Some of the black ones reverse to white so you get two background colors in one piece. And, if I lay out a composition that I end up really liking, I can rubber-cement the pieces down. The 20 x 30 inch size is easily photographed and if I do decide to keep it permanently, it’s also easily framed.

Here’s my first pass. Although I’m underwhelmed by the composition as a whole, I think parts of it will probably work well as fabric designs.

This week's challenge was a blast, as we asked participants to use paper & glue to create cake-themed collages they could then scan and turn into fabric. The winner — who also won our recent Family Crest competition — turned out to be an accomplished designer and artist named Bethany Shackelford, known to us as bzbdesigner. Be sure to check out all of the fabulous top ten!

In this week's challenge we asked designers to use paper and glue to create cake collages that they could then scan and turn into fabric designs. As is often the case, the more difficult the challenge, the more breathtaking the creativity. Vote for all your favorites in this week's contest and we'll announce the winner (and top 10) on Thursday morning.

This week's Fabric Of the Week contest theme is about process. Using a collage created from paper as the source, we asked designers to create a fabric by scanning the collage. The idea was to showcase examples of fabric designs that have relied on a minimum of digital manipulation. The entries are terrific, as usual. After you finish voting, you might enjoy watching a short video about the collage process used by childrens' illustrator Eric Carle to create the art for his books, which include The Very Hungry Caterpillar (and many of the other titles that line our little girls' bookshelves).